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Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 enables the development and management of application integration within and between organizations using the universal standard of XML. BizTalk Server 2000 provides comprehensive process management and is a platform for reliable business document interchange and business processes integration.

Solution Overview

Industry

Global retail: clothing, food, and financial services

Scenario

  • Business-to-business electronic commerce
  • Enhanced information distribution, improving supplier relationships and enabling a quicker response to seasonal trends
  • Integration of business processes internally and with suppliers
  • XML-based interoperability across multiple operating systems including IBM System 390 with CICS and MQSeries, using Microsoft BizTalk Server
  • N-tier Windows DNA architecture

Microsoft BizTalk
Technologies

Microsoft BizTalk Framework
Microsoft BizTalk JumpStart Kit
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000
















"We selected the Microsoft BizTalk Framework and Microsoft BizTalk Server as the core technologies for our corporate backbone because we recognized the great interoperability and integration capabilities they had to offer."

Mike Yorwerth
Project Manager
Marks & Spencer

Marks & Spencer Case Study

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Global retailer streamlines distribution of POS data using the Microsoft® BizTalk Framework and BizTalk Server 2000

Published: 4/4/2000

Using the Microsoft BizTalk Framework and BizTalk Server 2000, global retailer Marks & Spencer upgraded its IT infrastructure to rapidly deliver POS information to various corporate data-center applications and accelerate response time to emerging market trends. With revenues of $13.2 billion, Marks & Spencer is one of the United Kingdom's premier clothing, food, and financial services retailers.

Background

International retailer Marks & Spencer, with revenues of $13.2 billion, is one of the United Kingdom's premier clothing, food, and financial services retailers. Marks & Spencer has more than 600 retail and franchise operations stores in Central Europe, North America, and Asia, 500 of which are owned by the company. The retailer's commitment to value, quality, and service began nearly 120 years ago; Marks & Spencer is legendary in the retail industry for its supplier relationships and long-term thinking.

Marks & Spencer selected Extensible Markup Language (XML), the Microsoft BizTalk Framework, and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 to upgrade its information technology (IT) infrastructure. The goal: to ensure that point-of-sale (POS) data comes back to the data center in near real time and then can be passed to Marks & Spencer's or the supplier's operational systems. By rapidly identifying emerging sales trends, the company can make faster and better business decisions surrounding the management of promotions, control of inventory, and direction of the production of suppliers.

Business Challenge

Global retailing is in a period of intense competition, and Marks & Spencer needed to refocus and rethink its plans in order to respond. To support the business and drive it forward, Marks & Spencer had to maximize the availability of information across its various operational systems. Customer relationships, service, and innovation are vital to the retailer's success and are fueled by faster access to better information. The information flow needed to be near real time to allow rapid response to changing retail market demands.

"We saw our infrastructure redesign project, EPoS (Electronic Point of Sale), as an opportunity to leverage our uniquely strong integration with suppliers to create a dynamic, event-driven, global supply chain," says Mike Yorwerth, Project Manager at Marks & Spencer. "By having real-time access to sales and inventory information, we wanted to be able to place orders with our suppliers more rapidly so we can respond swiftly and efficiently to customer needs. For example, if we see that there is a sudden high demand for a specific product, we want to let our suppliers know as soon as possible so that they can ship new merchandise before we run out. This directly translates to improving the quality of customer service, which is the foundation of our business."

To hone this competitive advantage, Marks & Spencer wanted to deploy a solution that could support huge business and operational changes in the future, as well as make it possible to move data anywhere within the company's worldwide operations or supplier base. The requirement to integrate with each of its supplier's business processes, which are hosted on a variety of operating systems and platforms, added complexity to the project. Interoperability with these different environments required a technology that was broadly available, based on industry standards, and provided the flexibility and enterprise-class performance demanded by this solution.

Solution

Marks & Spencer reviewed a number of technology options in detail and decided the best solution to integrate data from its stores with its various back-end systems was the Microsoft BizTalk Framework and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000. The solution aims to move transaction-level POS data from the retail stores to the head-office data center in near real time. This will allow for the effective use of POS data, making it possible to monitor and respond to emerging market needs much more rapidly. In addition, the upgraded infrastructure will allow for the integration of business processes with more than 500 suppliers, using BizTalk business documents. This will support the development of a dynamic, event-based supply chain able to respond in near real time.

Marks & Spencer installed a single Microsoft Windows NT®-based server in each store, with POS terminals running the Windows NT Workstation operating system. Each transaction flows to the back-end server, which batches the transactions every minute, converts them to XML messages using simple XML tools, and sends the data to the corporate systems using the Microsoft Message Queue Services (MSMQ) in Windows NT Server. At the corporate data center, a load-balanced array of servers running Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 on the Windows® 2000 operating system receives these transmissions-and intelligently routes the right transaction information in the right format over the right transport to the right application where the data is integrated with the local business processes.

For example, for processing Marks & Spencer credit-card transactions, the existing infrastructure historically has relied on a custom-written CICS application running on IBM System 390 and supported by a DB2 database. When redesigning the EPoS system, Marks & Spencer developers wanted to take advantage of their existing CICS application rather than write a new application to handle the credit-card processing. To seamlessly integrate the existing CICS application with the new Windows 2000-based EPoS system, Marks & Spencer leveraged the capabilities of XML and BizTalk Server 2000. BizTalk Server was easily configured to identify all Marks & Spencer credit-card transactions based on the contents of specific fields in the incoming XML messages. BizTalk Server then transforms the credit-card transactions and forwards them to the CICS application using COM Transaction Integrator (COMTI) technology, an integrated part of Microsoft SNA Server.

Marks & Spencer also uses BizTalk Server 2000 to integrate the EPoS system with the MQSeries-based applications that are hosted on the IBM mainframe. Again, BizTalk Server was configured to identify a specific class of transaction that requires the support of the MQSeries application by examining the content of specific fields in the document. Once a document is identified, BizTalk Server transforms the document and forwards it to the Microsoft MSMQ/MQSeries bridge, which sends the transformed document to the IBM MQSeries application on the mainframe. The MSMQ/MQSeries bridge also is an integrated part of the Microsoft SNA Server.

Lastly, the EPoS system uses BizTalk Server 2000 to transform all XML documents and send them over MSMQ to a Windows 2000-based application. The XML data then is fed into Microsoft SQL Server™, automatically rolled up into data cubes, and analyzed using the integrated online analytical processing (OLAP) technology that is included with SQL Server version 7.0.

"By using XML and the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 as the point of integration with our IBM mainframe, we were able to maintain our existing investment in our CICS and MQSeries applications," says Yorwerth. "We are impressed with Microsoft's ability to fit into such a heterogeneous IT environment."

Some of the applications run remotely in a supplier data center, while others are local to Marks & Spencer's data center. This architecture can support up to 250 store transactions per second, easily handling up to 5 GB of traffic on a peak day.

As a result, detailed information is flowing in near real time from the POS to the back-end systems that support the stores. Marks & Spencer now can recognize emerging market changes, analyze trends, and ultimately make and implement business decisions that affect change in the stores far more quickly than before. This results in reduced costs and an increase in customer service.

Why Marks & Spencer Chose Microsoft

"We selected the Microsoft BizTalk Framework and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 as the core technologies for our corporate backbone because we recognized the great interoperability and integration capabilities they had to offer," says Yorwerth. "The flexibility to interchange data within Marks & Spencer and with our working partners, without having to redesign our applications, saved us tons of money and provides us with a tremendous competitive advantage thanks to BizTalk.

"Our business is committed to leveraging and exploiting the best of Microsoft technologies, for doing so reduces our R&D cost and time to roll out new services," Yorwerth adds. "Clearly, Microsoft is behind XML with its BizTalk technologies and is incorporating XML into all of its products. By making BizTalk a foundation of our architecture, we know that we are correctly positioned to benefit from future technologies Microsoft develops."

For More Information

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